


When Is a Monster Not a Monster? (oh, when you love it)

by Nevcolleil



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: (the Nogitsune isn't actually there), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Typical Violence, M/M, Pre-Slash, but you should know that if you saw the episode, series finale rewrite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2017-09-27
Packaged: 2019-01-06 01:22:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12201144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/pseuds/Nevcolleil
Summary: The Anuk-Ite knows Scott's deepest fear. It knows his deepest fear wears Stiles's face. (Or does it know even more than that?)How is Scott supposed to fight his fear blind... when what he fears lives in the darkness in his head?





	When Is a Monster Not a Monster? (oh, when you love it)

**Author's Note:**

> Writing this helped me come to terms with the series finale: a re-telling of the scene in the library.
> 
> Title from a poem by Caitlyn Siehl.

He’s been expecting it since they got to the school - has been steeling himself in case _this_ was the form the Anuk-ite would choose.

And still it steals his breath when he feels it slip into the library with him, oozes into his presence like slime, like smoke. Making the air thin. Making his lungs burn. And it’s barely even begun to confront him - all it is, at first, _is_ a presence. A quiet heartbeat thumping to life, _just_ familiar enough that he couldn’t possibly mistake it; just _off_ enough that it chills the blood in Scott’s veins.

Stiles’s heart has only ever sounded like that once. Too slow for Stiles, who is always excited about something - or anxious - anticipating... something. Joy, or terror - or heartbreak, or sex.

Then Scott hears his hands.

You think it’s harder to hear a soft touch than a footfall, than a deep breath? Not for Scott. Not even, maybe, before he was a werewolf. He’s learned to listen for Stile’s hands by habit, always _watching_ for where Stile’s hands will go next, knowing that they can never stay in one place for long.

Scott hears Stiles’s hands- _heard_ them, back when Stiles was here, before he left - a dozen times a day or more. Skin on skin when Stiles rubbed at his face or the back of his neck in frustration or discomfort. Accompanied by the soft tearing of paper or the crinkle of a wrapper, the scritch of the zipper on his hoodie whenever Stiles fiddled with something. Skin on fabric when he adjusted his shirt or reached down and adjusted himself through his pants. 

Stiles’s hands now crawl across a bookshelf like spiders’ legs, and Stiles’s fingers don’t move like they’re supposed to move - like Stiles moves. All motivation and the passion of a search,coordination and discretion struggling to keep up.

Stiles’s fingers crawl too. Fingertips brush the spines of old books like they’d brush over the knobs in a lover’s spin if those fingers were trying to seduce. 

Scott has to force himself to breathe evenly. When he closes his eyes, it’s only half because he consciously knows not to look at the Anuk-ite. He just doesn’t want to see-

“Hiding in the library, Scott?”

He doesn’t want to _hear_ that voice. No one, no _thing_ , could so perfectly mimic the exact cadence of Stiles’s voice, but there’s this flat, numb quality to it when it’s the voice of the Nogitsune talking to him. Like a voice of the dead. Or of someone who Scott might just as well be dead to.

“Hiding from me?” 

‘ _Fuck_.’

It doesn’t even help that the Anuk-ite breaks character to talk to Scott as itself. “You think you can fight me, but you can’t,” it says, but the words are so similar to ones Scott’s heard in his dreams - in his nightmares - that they are truly _Stiles’s_ words when they reach Scott’s ears.

(‘You think you can fight this, but you can’t,’ Stiles has laughed into Scott’s ear, as they’ve cuddled in daydreams and fantasies, with a smile and a kiss. ‘You think you can fight _me_?’ he’s roared in night terrors, sneering into Scott’s face as Stiles twists a knife.)

“Open your eyes, Scott,” the Anuk-ite says, and Scott has to squeeze his eyelids tight not to instinctually follow the command.

“Your friends are gone,” it continues, moving so... so slowly towards him. “They saw my face and it drove them insane.”

Scott doesn’t move. He just keeps trying to breathe, not to pant, like his asthmatic self would once have done. Like he _did_ a time or two when Stiles got quiet, and Scott thought maybe he’d given himself away. But Stiles never figured it out. And Scott got good at not looking at Stiles the way he couldn’t help but want to look sometimes - he can stop himself from looking now.

‘This is just a dumb _monster_ ,’ Scott thinks. And the Anuk-Ite _is_. It can sense Scott’s fear... can even, apparently, mimic some of Scott’s memories. If Scott could look, he knows what he’d see slinking along the shelves between him and freedom. Stiles, looking as little like Stiles as he possibly can while wearing Stiles’s face. Eyes sunken and dark and blank, except when they’re amused. Pale like death.

All of that is just a _show_ , though. 

The Anuk-Ite can’t _interpret_ the memories it reads. It can only cast weak shadows of what Scott really fears. It can’t draw from what lurks deeper-

Or so Scott thinks.

“They’re gone because of you. You failed them,” it accuses in Stiles’s voice, and Scott’s breath hitches. “You failed everyone...”

‘No.’

“Just like you failed Allison,” Sti- _the Anuk-Ite_ says. Scott’s heart pounds.

He can barely think through the grief that claws at his throat. _This_ \- This, Scott has to try harder to resist.

“Just like you failed me,” the Nogitsune breathes, from barely a shelf away, and Scott slips for one second - for just one moment. He doesn’t open his eyes, but the word escapes his lips.

“No...”

“Open your eyes, Scott,” the Anuk-Ite says, suddenly in front of him. Scott can feel the air move around it, can sense its evil. But its voice vibrates, that way Stiles’s does sometimes - wavers with emotion when he’s really hurt, or _really_ angry.

Scott’s nose even tries to convince him that this thing _smells_ like Stiles. Like Stiles bled through with the sickness of the Nogitsune. 

“Open them,” it demands. “Open your eyes and look at _what you’ve done_.”

“I-” _-didn’t do this_ , Scott immediately starts to say, and catches himself just in time. “I know you’re not real. I know what you are, and you can’t fool me,” he finally says.

“You let this happen to me,” the Nogitsune says as if the Anuk-Ite wasn’t listening. “You let the Nogitsune take me. Change me. I’m a killer because of you... I’m _dying_ , Scott. I’m dying because of you!”

Scott’s claws unsheathe. He wants to lash out - to make the first move. Anything to take this fight where Deucalion taught him to fight it. He’s not prepared to fight the Anuk-Ite’s words. _Nothing_ could have prepared him for them. 

But that’s what the thing wants, isn’t it? It will be hard enough for Scott to fight the monster blind, listening for its movements without the distraction of trying to coordinate his own. He has to wait for _it_ to move and counter the attack. One strong, serious blow at the beginning is Scott’s best hope of holding out against the Anuk-Ite long enough for the real Stiles to get here and help him take it down.

Unfortunately, when the Anuk-Ite finally moves... it takes Scott a moment to recognize it as a move.

A hand presses to Scott’s side - not clawing or bruising, just touching, just there. Where the Nogitsune had stabbed him that time.

And _it’s Stiles’s hand_. It feels absolutely like Stiles’s hand. Everything from the clammy cold of it - Scott can feel its lack of warmth through his shirt - to the fluttery way Stile’s fingertips had danced over the blade of a katana, the way they’re dancing now, only one layer of fabric removed from his skin, tell Scott that it’s Stiles touching him.

It’s Stiles he’d be mauling, if he struck now for the Anuk-Ite’s throat.

He’d _have_ to look - if he felt warm blood dripping down his claws while he felt Stiles’s hand on his body, Scott would have to look or he’d go crazy.

“St- _stop_ ,” Scott says.

“ _Open them_ , Scott,” Stiles/the Nogitsune/the Anuk-Ite pleads. “Open your eyes for me. Look at me just one last time. Come on, Scotty... I know how you like looking at this face.”

It’s so fucked up. _It’s so fucked up_...

“You’re not the Void. And you’re _not_ Stiles,” Scott insists. He knows it. And however convincing it may act, the Anuk-Ite knows it too. He just has to be strong _a little longer_.

“I’m what you made me,” the thing hisses, it’s stolen touch dipping close to the hem of Scott’s shirt.

The threat of feeling that touch beneath his clothes, from something that isn’t Stiles but as if it were, is finally enough to force Scott’s hand. He can’t bring himself to claw - but he does shove. The Anuk-Ite goes flying into the shelves behind it and the shelves groan, books falling to either side as the massive shelves tilt and settle.

Scott backs away from the sound, further into the open space at the center of the library, and the fight is on.

The Anuk-Ite swipes at him, and Scott dodges its claws. It growls like Derek and tries again, cursing him in Malia’s voice.

And it tries again, shrieking like a banshee... and again. Sometimes Scott can guess the form it’s taken - its voice shifts to the guttural rumbles of a berserker; to the eerie clicks and whirs of a dread doctor. At one point, Scott hears a ghostly neigh like the ones he’d heard when they faced the wild hunt.

Sometimes he’s exchanging blows and lunges with a fear he can visualize in the darkness behind his eyelids - sometimes Scott’s fighting _truly_ blind.

Once or twice, the Anuk-Ite speaks for itself. “Your fear is different,” it tells him. “There’s power underneath. _Your_ power. Your fear is my freedom!”

Scott has only the vaguest idea of what it’s talking about, but it doesn’t matter. The fight must last minutes, but it feels like it goes on forever. And every time Scott feels at his weakest - like he’s _just_ about to give, just to make it stop - Stiles’s voice is there again.

“Open ‘em, Scott. All you have to do is open them,” it says when Scott barely has the energy left to shake his head.

“All you have to do is open your eyes,” Stiles’s lips say as it dodges one last, weak swipe of Scott’s claws and Stiles’s hand wraps, impossibly strong, around Scott’s throat. 

Scott paws at the arm attached, grabs it by the wrist, but the unforgiving grip doesn’t relent.

“I won’t be trapped again,” it shrieks. “I won’t be caught and caged. Not again. Not. _Ever_. Again...”

It chokes Scott. With the hands of his best friend. Of the first person Scott loved who wasn’t already family when they met. Of the person Scott still loves most, in more ways than the real Stiles even knows. In ways Scott’s fought, and failed to defeat, every bit as hard as he’s fought his fear of what losing Stiles - to a monster... to death, to his own terrible choices - would do to him.

It’s the best thing the Anuk-Ite could have done. Because Stiles, the _real_ Stiles - the only Stiles left, with the Nogitsune well and truly dead - would never hurt Scott like this. Fight him, maybe. Like he had when his dad got hurt. When he was hurting too badly himself not to lash out... But never like this.

Stiles would break his own hands before he’d threaten Scott’s life with them.

And that gives Scott the idea he’s needed to win this fight, surer than any training Deucalion could have given him.

“I know how to fight you," Scott says, as the inspiration comes to him. “And I know how to get you.”

He thinks he can even handle it, although the very thought turns his stomach and makes him shake with fright and disgust.

Scott gathers up all the might he can muster and forces the Anuk-Ite away from him once more.

Then he brings back his claws... and sinks them into his own eyes.

He gouges until there’s no amount of werewolf healing that could repair them fast enough for him to see whatever the Anuk-Ite tries next.

It roars in understanding, the sound of its rage blending with Scott’s own anguished screams.

And the Anuk-Ite tries to gut him in its most physically imposing form - Scott can hear its bones adjusting, the swish of razor-sharp appendages barely missing their mark as Scott ducks and twists and weaves. It tries picking a form from Scott’s mind that matches Scott’s speed in his memories - an Oni warrior. The blade of its katana sings in the air, but Scott is faster now. Adrenaline gives Scott back the energy that had waned, and pain gives him a focus even stronger than his fears. He can track each shift of the Oni’s robes and anticipate its aim, and with every blow he deflects or avoids altogether, Scott’s confidence grows.

“You can’t beat me,” he finds himself saying, after the Anuk-Ite’s taunts have run out and its attacks have begun to feel desperate. “I’m not afraid of you. Not anymore.”

Scott isn’t. All of these things the Anuk-Ite’s tried to replicate, all these bad memories it’s tried to weaken Scott with - they’re just that. Memories. Of things that he feared but that he survived - even the Nogitsune. The Void tried to take Stiles from Scott - it took Allison. And maybe it couldn’t have if Scott had fought harder. Fought smarter.

But Scott’s still fighting. And he still has Stiles. Stiles will be here any minute, and Scott _can’t_ fail with Stiles on the way. He can’t leave Stiles to face the Anuk-Ite alone. 

Scott catches the Anuk-Ite hesitating. Uncertain what nightmare of Scott’s to exploit next? Or realizing that what Scott said, he meant. Scott lets his fangs drop, and he roars. The Anuk-Ite’s hesitation becomes faltering. It doesn’t move.

Good. Outside the library, Scott hears the slap of converse against floor tile - the pattern of the hurried steps slightly off-set by Stiles’s limp.

“You wanted enough power so that you could never be trapped again," he says to the thing waiting, wanting the Anuk-Ite to know that Scott _knows_ he’s won. “You wanted the power of a shapeshifter like me... But that comes with all the rules of being a shapeshifter.”

It’s the first time in Scott’s life that he’s wanted to _revel_ in a victory over another living being. The Anuk-Ite has caused so much suffering here, so much loss. An entire pack is _gone_. Scott can’t be sure that his isn’t as well. He’s only hoping that the solution Stiles is bringing will not only contain the Anuk-Ite but also cut off its victims from the source of the Anuk-Ite’s magic. 

“We have weaknesses," Scott says through his fangs. “And we have lines that we can’t cross.”

And like they choreographed it, Stiles slams through the double doors of the library.

Scott hears the Anuk-Ite shift, Stiles’s heartbeat stutter and a subtle sound like ice breaking across a ship’s bough, and Scott’s own heart freezes in his chest.

But if Stiles _is_ looking at the Anuk-Ite, it’s too late to matter. Scott’s already heard him skid to a stop on the library carpet, stretch to toss the mountain ash he took from the armory. 

There’s the sounds of glass shattering, the Anuk-Ite shrieking like a howling wind, and then the ice breaking again - as loud as a thunder crack now, and multiplying until the howling stops - until Stiles’s heartbeat, his _actual_ heartbeat, and his deep, shaky breaths are all that Scott can hear, the most soothing sounds Scott can remember hearing since Stiles boarded a plane and waved Scott a goodbye.

“Scott! Oh my _god_ , Scott...” 

Stiles’s actual voice washes over him, Stiles’s _actual_ hands touch his face as if Stiles is afraid _Scott_ will break if he isn’t handled like porcelain.

Maybe Scott _is_ broken, a little. 

But he’s not alone.

And for the first time in a long time, the fear of aloneness finding him in the all-too-near future is passed. (At least for now.)


End file.
